Weekend Leadership Reading: 4/12/19

Weekends are time when things slow down a little. Your weekend shouldn’t be two more regular work days. That’s a sure road to burnout. Take time to refresh yourself. Take time for something different. Take time for some of that reading you can’t find time for during the week.

Here are choice articles on hot leadership topics culled from the business schools, the business press and major consulting firms. This week there are articles about failure.

“Across from the Black Bull Inn, just off the Canterbury Road in Folkestone England, I used to get Maryland fried chicken from a Chinese take-out at a post office run by an Indian family. The chicken was notable mostly for the battered, deep fried bananas that were thrown in – looking like giant fried worms when first bitten by the uninitiated. The chicken was passable – mediocre by my taste but then I eat a lot of fried chicken. If that family is still running the post office, then their chicken is probably still being served to this day. After all, the chicken was not so bad that they would fail outright, and in any case they could survive as a post office or by selling Chinese food; yet neither did they delight their customers. Like so many businesses, they survived somewhere in the middle.”

“According to this opinion piece by Scott Cowen, president emeritus and distinguished university chair of Tulane University, a full active work life will, of course, produce some failures. What counts are the lessons taken from them.”

“Now reflect for a moment on how you treat yourself when you make a big mistake or experience a setback. It’s likely that you’re much tougher on yourself — that you spring to self-criticism (‘I’m such an idiot!’), hide in embarrassment or shame (‘Ugh!’), or ruminate for a long time on your perceived shortcomings or bad luck (‘Why did this happen to me?’). When things go wrong in our lives, we tend to become our own worst enemy. To recover emotionally and get back on your feet, here’s an approach you can take: self-compassion.”

“So it’s probably not surprising that we’ve come to glorify failure. We are urged to ‘fail fast’ and are cheered on when we do. Failure, after all, is hard evidence that you’ve tried something difficult and paid the price. Yet failure, as anyone who actually experienced it knows well, is a horrible, painful thing.”